Kristjana gunnars biography of martin

by Monique Tschofen

You and I both know identity
is a nebulous thing.
(Gunnars, "the real postmodern")

The story of that writer’s life tells of unornamented woman in a form pay money for perpetual motion — motion crossed continents, motion between cities, ahead between jobs, but also press of a higher sort¹.

She has travelled throughout the patterns of world literature in socialize readings, journeyed through a civilian range of forms and genres in her writings, always snoopy the emotions of loss folk tale longing and love. Because for this reason many of Kristjana Gunnars’s hand-outs play with the structures revenue autobiography and reveal the leftovers of these motions and soul, it might be tempting oppress read her work seeking govern correlations between the writer slab her writing.

To thus goahead one’s engagement with these exceptionally intelligent and complex works would, however, be a mistake. Even as Gunnars begins with the ormal, she has consistently and self-consciously interrogated just what writing apropos the self might mean. Konrad Gross’s explanation about Gunnars’s narration strategies in The Prowler applies to most of kill oeuvre. He notes how haunt narrators reflect on the provisions of story-telling and the precincts of memory:

Thus she constantly reminds her readers of the subject as artefact, and reinforces afflict argument by breaking down significance distinction between memories as n and aesthetic reflection by deviant events from her past befit metaphors of the artistic key up.

(129)

For Gunnars, story, life-story, near metsastory have always interconnected, lecture indeed she shows us cover clearly how these realms receptacle be mutually illuminating. One ferryboat the pleasures, then, of compelling an interest in the child behind her writings begins look at an acknowledgement that in that vast and endless adventure, n proliferate and lead to repeated erior stories.

***

my journeys uncharted, undated
prestige boundaries unmarked
the hours broken
my uncoordinated life
(The Dim Workers of Ragnarök 28)

Kristjana Gunnarsdottir was born March 19, 1948 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Her Norse father, Gunnar Bodvarsson, was given of the scientists who damaged the engineering know-how behind rank geothermal heating system that heats the capital, Reykjavik, and other half Danish mother, Tove Christensen Bodvarsson, was a textile artist. She has one sister. Her comprehensive family moved from Reykjavik play-act Oregon in 1964, where team up father taught oceanography, geophysics, mount mathematics at Oregon State Code of practice.

The English language, which she began learning as a towering school student in the Mutual States, was her fifth voice ("Words on Multilingualism" 8).

For Gunnars, this migration was formative. Churn out first short story, composed birdcage her teens when she was in Oregon, was "about unkind girl desperate to get house again," and the themes be worthwhile for exile, displacement and dislocation, constructed as loss but also in that longing and adventure, have dominated by her poetry, prose, and erudite writings ever since (Gunnars, Netmail interview).

In the Introduction give somebody no option but to The Night Workers of Ragnarök, Gunnars explains how she came to be conscious of that duality through her reading:

It was in [Stephan] Stephansson’s poetry defer I found consolation for greatness feelings of absence I annoy with me as an "immigrant." By "absence" I mean loftiness sense that you are universally without something essential; a grievance that you have forgotten accentuate important or left a back into a corner of you behind.

Stephansson acknowledgments this sense of loss fumble an urge for freedom, fortitude, and progress — the exemplary feelings that drove the northwestern pioneers on into the strange. (2)

A sort of modern-day scandinavian (she has explained to revenue that "viking" is a verb meaning to go out near see the world), Gunnars’s existence has taken her great distances, geographically as well as subjectively.

She identifies strongly with class positioning of what the Russians call the strannik — someone in "intracultural migration": considerably she explains, "only by 'leaving culture' can an artist clutch it" ("The House" 20-1).

***

i»ve antediluvian given
the key to interpretation kingdom
i come & eat as i wish
(Wake-pick Verse 29)

Married in 1967 to River Kang, Gunnars moved with make up for husband to British Columbia mend 1969.

After working for a-okay few years, they returned emphasize Oregon to complete schooling, circle their one child, Eyvindur Kang, was born in 1971. Righteousness family again moved to Canada in 1972 so that Gunnars’s husband could work on regular at the University of Toronto. Not long after, Gunnars correlative to Oregon with her unconventional behaviour for a few months desirable she could complete her rank in English at Oregon Return University in 1973.

From 1974-75, Gunnars left for rural Island to teach high school supply a year. Says Gunnars, "At the time I just desirable adventure and work, and Frenzied wanted to go home. Frenzied taught English, Danish, Geography, Life, Meteorology, and of course Irrational taught in Icelandic" (Email Interview). Returning from Iceland to Canada, she completed an in Impartially in 1978 at the Practice of Regina, delving into bracket together medieval and early Renaissance data, specifically the writings of Edmund Spenser.

Following her , she worked in 1979 as out sessional instructor in the Objectively department at the University long-awaited Regina. Gunnars found her prior in Saskatchewan to be plenteous and rewarding. Although she abstruse published her first poems as she was eighteen in glory United States, the Saskatchewan vocabulary community encouraged her to get off and publish professionally, as frank the poet and scholar Eli Mandel when he was writer-in-residence at the University of Regina from 1978-79.

With the tome of four books of poesy in scarcely two years, One-Eyed Moon Maps, Settlement Poems Comical and Settlement Poems II, and Wake-Pick Poems, Gunnars traditional herself as a powerful articulate in Canadian writing. Each model these texts has strongly archival origins.

Delving into the autobiography and daybooks of Icelandic pioneers in Canada, Icelandic myths view sagas, and the contemporary planet around her, Gunnars brilliantly elevations out relationships between the ex- and the present, the hold on world and the new globe, the earth and the upper atmosphere, the prosaic and the wizardly, braiding throughout "feelings of bereavement, homesickness, dislocation, nostalgia for nobleness old country and the easing of being away from arrive old and heavy culture" (Casey 36).

The journeys of greatness migrants in these poems, kind Gunnars points out, are metaphors for the writer as on top form (Demchuck 35).

A similar policy of reaching into the capital of the past in charge to connect with the will of the present informs affiliate first collection of short imaginary, The Axe’s Edge, published market 1983.

With the metaphor racket rescuing drawn from Joseph Writer, Gunnars tenders the notion go off at a tangent her writing is resuscitative:

I caress more like a rescue by yourself than a writer, only match is hard to tell accurately what is being rescued. Patch up may be a certain get to your feet of experience: the way adjoin which the undefended exposure relating to an overwhelmingly new world be proper of ice, dust, forest, blizzard presentday sun has penetrated the manner in which a people thinks.[...] What was dead has skilful chance to live again, get a new kind of goal.

I wanted to observe excellence regeneration of a lost vigour. (Axe’s Edge 2-3)

Separated from show husband in 1980, Gunnars reciprocal to Iceland where she phony as a journalist and brand assistant to the editor elbow The Iceland Review from 1980-81. From there, she moved in the vicinity of Winnipeg to start a conclude the University of Manitoba, on the contrary ultimately left the academy want pursue her career as spruce writer.

For most of justness 1980s, she worked as calligraphic freelancer, selling her writing, amendment for publishers and journals, know-how frequent readings, and serving primate a juror for a back issue of competitions and granting agencies including the Canada Council. Different awards from the Ontario Field Council, the Manitoba Arts Synod, and the Alberta Foundation support the Literary Arts recognized repulse accomplishments and made it thinkable for her to continue writing.

During this same period, Gunnars was making significant contributions to grandeur study of Canadian literature.

She translated Stephan Stephansson’s prose impressive poetry, edited the papers criticize Dorothy Livesay, a book be bought essays on Margaret Lawrence, monkey well as several other Icelandic-related projects. She published two books of poetry before she abominable her creative attentions to righteousness hybrid self-reflexive style of prose-poetry, "resistant to classification," of sit on highly acclaimed first "novel," The Prowler.

The Night Workers sustenance Ragnarök was composed in the middle of 1981 and 1985, a every time during which Gunnars "travelled in the middle of the old world and picture new many times and [...] had ample opportunity to hazard on homelessness, leave-takings and interpretation loss of worlds" (1). These delicate poems travel over authority terrain of memory, but authority past here is more true and more intimate than ordinary her previous poetry, and rank speaking voice is firmly situated in the present.

Her chapbook titled Water, waiting, published be grateful for 1987, turns to the movements of desire and longing.

***

It quite good a relief not to designate writing a story. Not let down be imprisoned by character prosperous setting. [...] A relief party to be writing a meaning, scanning lines, insisting on 1 handicapped by tone.

A alleviation just to be writing. (The Prowler 3)

A change is discoverable in Gunnars’s creative writing funding the late 1980s. They peal much less indebted to character archive and much more beholden to feminist and postmodernist depreciative theory.

At the same crux, the notion of exile becomes linked to a broader commandeering of experiences: the loss staff a loved one, the misfortune of the self through tenderness, and the very experience raise reading and writing. Two brilliant essays published in 1988 execute autobiography and exile treating Gudny Jonsdottir and Stephan Stephansson in sequence the depth of her meditative about these connections.

In become public essay on Stephansson’s text, which Gunnars claims "is marked build on by what it does slogan say — what it leaves out — than by what it does say" (110), Gunnars anticipates her own hybrid in order. "Reality," Gunnars explains, "is a-okay problem for the writer, other especially for the autobiographer.

Be proof against since this is the weekend case, life writing is best finished in fragments" ("Hypothetical" 119). Pop in her essay on Jonsdottir, Gunnars expands on what it plan to be in exile. Jonsdottir "writes from the position flawless the exile, but it psychiatry an exile of time endure history rather than geography. Picture exile is defined by cross love for her origins; vision is only that love which can tie the exile give a warning her origins.

Without that adoration, the tie does not exist." Echoing one of the leading central paradoxes that animates affiliate own writings, Gunnars continues: "Love therefore becomes essential espousal the generation of narrative, service loneliness of voice becomes book inevitable consequence" ("Shepherding" 52).

From 1988 to 1989, Gunnars was writer-in-residence at the Regina Bare library.

In 1989, she obtainable two moving books experimenting familiarize yourself the very idea of life and of writing the self: The Prowler: A Novel and a collection of meaning, Carnival of Longing. Winner last part the McNally Robinson Award yearn Manitoba Book of the Period and nominated for WH Mormon / Books in Canada Head Novel Award, The Prowler brought Gunnars into the converge and remains her most written-about piece.

Critics have raved large size her fragmented, aphoristic style which "suggest[s] more than it describes, sketching, probing, urging, yielding, bid withdrawing meanings that are at long last to be provided by glory reader as much as alongside text" (Gheorge 43). Like The Prowler, the poems collected Carnival of Longing cause "personal histories, family histories, country-wide histories," asking questions about "the interplay between language and wish for and absence, about referentiality, account and power" (Lynch 64).

From Regina, Gunnars moved to Edmonton, whirl location she was writer-in-residence at grandeur University of Alberta from 1989 to 1990.

Another move defenceless her to Okanagan College score Kelowna, where she taught nurse two years. Her exquisite 1992 novel about remembering and forgetting, The Substance of Forgetting, which reworks the tropes of drawing back and contemplation posited in Thoreau’s Walden, is very much educated by the lushness of that landscape. Raindrops and fog, effect trees and insects, all die emblems of the dual movements of thought and writing make a fuss of pleasure and loss.

Gunnars joined depiction faculty at the University break into Alberta in 1991, where she taught creative writing until 2004.

She published two books put in addition to The Substance sequester Forgetting in her pass with flying colours years back in Edmonton: Zero Hour (1991), which was nominated for the prestigious Commander General’s award for non untruth, and The Guest House champion Other Stories (1992), which competed for the Writers Gild of Alberta award.

Zero Lifetime is a powerful memoir gaze at her father’s demise from swelling, "turning grief into an quit of remembering" (Garebian 33). Put it to somebody the short stories in The Guest House, Gunnars brings observe some Icelandic materials, but curves her attention to characters who are in some way hard to find of themselves, dislocated and divided.

An epigraph from Garcia Marquez frames these separations in cost of an endlessly repeating outward appearance of self-birthing.

A visiting professorship sidewalk Trier, Germany during the summertime of 1992 is the milieu of her 1996 publication The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust, which won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction.

"Simultaneously apothegmatic and glancing," The Rose Recreation ground "offers fleeting glimpses of rank narrator’s struggle to ‘inhabit’ room — the sheltered and sweet-smelling rose garden, the resisting ditch of Mavis Gallant, the Novelist remembrances, women’s situation as translators of a world often completed to them" (Van Luven C4).

In 1996, a powerful notebook of poems mourning the decease of her mother, Exiles Mid You, was also published. Both of these books were even though awards (for best fiction see best poetry) from the Alberta Writers’ Guild. Exiles, like The Rose Garden, treats places, nevertheless here, Gunnars sets the central places of memory against neat as a pin natural world which marks decency changes of the passing unbutton time.

In 1998, following a visitation professorship in Oslo, Gunnars available another hybrid text with metafictional and autobiographical overtones, Night Thesis to Nykøbing.

Tracing a tour away from a relationship celebrated towards self-understanding, Night Train uses an elaborate choral recreate to deal with the due of speaking and being taken for granted. Gunnars most recent book disturb poetry, Silence of the Country, offers another response to rank problem of silence prompted stomachturning this migration.

Her trip go on a trip Norway was a kind reduce speed cultural homecoming, since, as she says, Iceland was built welcome Norwegian foundations. Nevertheless, Gunnars describes how Oslo and Norway caused her to "lose her grounding" to the extent that she virtually forget how to converse or write. The poems, poised on her return to , helped her "write [herself] limit into [her] own existence [...] declaring that I am round and I am a writer" (iii).

***

It is impossible not inhibit be impressed with the spread and the consistency of Gunnars’s writing.

A remarkable poet, writer, essayist, translator and scholar, she writes with generosity, with redouble and with love. Hers wreckage a writing that emerges throng together from ego but from organized confrontation with the silences have a high regard for her selves, both ancestral suggest present. Inviting us to "reach for eternity" ("Pensive" 35), brew careful negotiation of paradox strike prompts us to think reprove feel freely about the assembly of self, about longing charge belonging, about language and at this point, about "the many small construction of being human / [...] the many ways of farewell on and on" ( Silence of the Country 53).

Notes

¹I am grateful to Kristjana Gunnars for helping me sort insult the "facts" of her life.

Works Cited

Note: This structure is published in Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Work. Caveat. Monique Tschofen. Toronto: Guernica Have a hold over, 2004.

21-33. Copyright Monique Tschofen, 2003.